Social media and mental health: can we use social media for self-care?
We hear a lot about how bad social media is for us.
We hear a lot about how bad social media is for us.
Our phones are really hard to ignore. With their push notification and feeds we can refresh endlessly there’s always something new waiting for us.
Nomofobia…any idea what this is a fear of? It’s the fear of being without your mobile phone; unreachable and unable to answer any calls or messages.
Just over ten years ago the first iPhone was released to the world. It’s amazing to think that in such a short space of time how much this Smartphone has changed how we live and relate to one another.
In 2015, 19-year-old Essena O’Neil – an Instagram model with over 800,000 followers – announced she was quitting social media.
A few years ago, researchers invited pairs of strangers into a lab to run an experiment.
We hear a lot about social media being bad for our mental health. But what if the problem isn’t just the technology itself, but us too? What if our brains just haven’t evolved to cope with social media?
Do you ever open social media and then instantly forget what you were looking for as soon as you open your feed? You spend a few minutes scrolling, having a pootle around… then you close the app and suddenly remember what you were looking for in the first place.
To navigate our digital world with skill – aware of the benefits, challenges, and keys for digital wellbeing – we need to understand the nature of our digital world. How does it work? How many of us are online now and what does the future hold for digital wellbeing?
How do you make sure technology improves your life rather than distracting you from it? Ask someone on the street this question and chances are they’ll tell you to cut down your screen time. But is that all there is to it? It’s fairly obvious that spending 12 hours a day glued to a screen,…